Guarantee
A recurring bugbear for Hume and other Constitutional Nationalists was London’s guarantee to Unionists that no constitutional change would ever occur without their consent. That guarantee had the appearance of properly taking account of Unionists’ constitutional rights. However, in doing so it took absolutely no account of Nationalists’ legislative rights. Hume even made the blunt argument that such an unspoken guarantee to Unionists had been the cornerstone of the intransigent one-party government that ran Northern Ireland for sixty years and was the root cause of the Troubles.9 The fact that Britain had given a legislative guarantee of no constitutional change to Unionists strengthened their hand immensely. In negotiations, not just about constitutional change, but on any agenda for reform, it served Unionists to simply retreat to their constitutional guarantee position, which tended to be enough to foil any initiative for change. Therefore Hume and others railed against it and attempted to rethink and reconfigure the political landscape outside it, based on the fact that Northern Ireland was an artificial jurisdiction from its foundation and that the consent of all its people was never sought. For as long as the guarantee obtained in Northern Ireland existed, democracy could only exist in a vitiated form.
Sunningdale was a fundamental break with London’s position that no new political structures were required to achieve stability for Northern Ireland. Today the agreement reads as both a reasonable and a prescient document. For example, both the Irish and British governments accept (in paragraph five) that there could be no change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland without the consent of a majority. This was an unprecedented recognition for the Irish government. At the same time, the British prime minister signed up to a clause providing that ‘if in the future the majority of the people of Northern Ireland should indicate a wish to become part of a united Ireland, the British Government would support that wish’; and (in paragraph thirteen) that it ‘was broadly accepted that the two parts of Ireland are to a considerable extent inter-dependent in the whole field of law and order’.10
In 1973, the slightest hint of a United Ireland in the future and the acknowledgement of an existing symbiotic relationship between Ireland North and South seemed to enrage Unionism. The structure of the Council of Ireland, designed to reflect the interdependence of the two states in Ireland, became a source of contempt for hardline Unionism. Conor Cruise O’Brien, then Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, argued that the Council of Ireland was asking Unionism to concede too much, while Republicans recoiled from the Council of Ireland because they saw it as an implicitly partitionist institution.
Besides the philosophical misgivings of both the nationalist right-wing and the Unionist right-wing, the practical task of sustaining Sunningdale’s institutions represented an enormous undertaking. Dermot Nally, a senior official of the Irish government, estimated at the time that sustaining the Council of Ireland alone would require 2,000 civil servants to maximise its functions. Sunningdale required for its success a huge degree of good will and determined commitment.
Sunningdale
The civil rights protests had been a necessary step, but only a first step, toward recasting politics in Northern Ireland. Hume’s attempts to awaken the conscience of Stormont were met by an almost preternatural unwillingness. With the signing of the Sunningdale Agreement, however, Hume realised that Northern Ireland now had a reasonable framework within which the diverse facets of Northern identity could be recognised. The Sunningdale Executive contained within it the strands – centrist Nationalist and Unionist parties in the North, along with Southern Irish and British participation – that together would form the basis for a workable political process in Northern Ireland provided that Britain and Ireland would stand by the newly minted Executive.
However, it was going to take enormous political will to prop up the Sunningdale arrangements and within weeks of the signing of the Agreement signs of serious tension were already evident. In a December 1973 report to the Department of Foreign Affairs Headquarters, Seán Donlon, then head of Northern Irish policy for the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, expressed doubt that Sunningdale could last because Faulkner had lost too much Unionist support. Getting on the ground and exercising ‘shoe-leather diplomacy’, Donlon had spoken to people who held the keys of Orange Halls in Newry, Dungannon and Omagh and the isolation of the Executive was becoming clear to him.
The murder by the Provisional IRA of Thomas Niedermayer, general manager in Northern Ireland of the German company, Grundig, and honorary consul for West Germany, was devastating. Niedermayer was murdered on 27 December 1973 (subsequently his wife and both his daughters committed suicide), and his abduction and murder happened against the backdrop of Hume, as Minister for Commerce in the Sunningdale Executive, attempting to promote Northern Ireland as a location for foreign investment by multinationals. In a broader context, it also occurred at a time when Ireland and the UK had just joined the EEC, and the possibility of new investment from Europe and from the US were opening up.
For all the hostile reception and the variety of opposition Sunningdale provoked among disparate political groups, North and South, it marked a glimpse of a new political era. The Catholic minority, which had been dispossessed for half a century since the foundation of the State, finally had achieved parity of esteem in a power-sharing Executive. The degree of the shift which occurred could be seen in this succinct summation by Austin Currie: ‘I became the Minister for Housing and Planning. The person who had been squatting in a discrimination case in a house in Caledon in 1968 was, by 1974, in charge of housing and planning. It was quite a remarkable achievement and it was done by non-violent political activity.’ Hume’s wife, Pat, remembers that Hume, as Minister for Commerce in the power-sharing Executive, had scarcely ever worked so hard in his life: he was convinced that the path to securing political stability lay through economic growth.
In advance of a trip to the US by Hume in April 1974, to promote industrial investment in Northern Ireland, an official of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office forearmed himself with briefing material for Hume, but decided that given Hume’s experience in the US, his command of Irish history, and the historic significance of the power-sharing Executive, it would have been ‘otiose’ to hand Hume the briefing material. In the US, Hume spoke to the media regarding Northern Ireland as a prime destination for investment. Hume was due to meet Senator Ted Kennedy, which he had confided to the FCO in strict confidence (as he was already conscious of the SDLP members’ sensitivities that the media was putting a preponderant emphasis on Hume’s personality). Nevertheless, there was wide coverage of his visit in print and television media in Washington, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. The US State Department report of his visit in print and television media in Washington, New York, and Boston, asserts:
Hume proved to be effective spokesperson for moderates in Northern Ireland before key Congressmen who until hearing Hume had evidently had more exposure to IRA views than those of hitherto unknown SDLP. SDLP case, however, proved convincing and further visits to Washington by Catholic leaders like Hume could very well result in recognition of SDLP as legitimate spokesman for Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.11
Hume’s visit resulted in a letter of thanks and encouragement from the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, James Callaghan, on 13 May 1974.
The Collapse of Sunningdale
The Executive’s problems continued to multiply exponentially, primarily because it was built on unstable foundations. The Sunningdale Agreement was technically a Joint Communiqué, intended as a prelude to an international agreement to be registered at the United Nations for full ratification. However, animosity to it from all sides intensified. In the South, Kevin Boland, who led a splinter from the Fianna Fáil party and held extreme nationalist views, challenged Sunningdale’s constitutionality but failed; during his challenge, Southern politicians were prohibited sub judice from defending it. Yet while the Council of Ireland is often cited as the determinative element that finally brought Sunningdale down, there were other factors that weighed heavily in its demise.
The
